EIGHTY-FIVE MILLION U.S. adults are at least somewhat receptive to one or more of three Internet appliances concepts-Internet TVs, screenphones and portable Internet devices-according to a new study.

The report, "Consumer Demand For Internet Appliances," is new from New York-based business-research and -analysis firms Find/SVP and Cyber Dialogue.

Demand for simpler, lower-cost (non-PC) Internet-access devi ces is set to explode, the study states. The increasing reliance on e-mail will fuel interest in Internet appliances, which will, in turn, make e-mail more accessible and universal.

By yearend 1999, more than 1 million adults will access the Internet via television-more than three times the number that will use screenphones. At the same time, some 800,000 will access the Internet using portable devices.

SEMICONDUCTORONLINE is offering engineers a chance to host their own chat forums. Fill out the form with an idea for a topic and suggested date. Pick the "talk" icon on the main page.

"SILICON COCKROACHES -fax machines and modems-are chewing up bandwidth faster than it can be built. These devices are going to change the economics of bandwidth usage. The Internet backbone can't keep up.

"Three years ago, bandwidth doubled every year; now it doubles every two to three months, and even [the company I work for] Uunet is only planning a fourfold increase, because the technology is not there to be able to go any faster.

"You can't get it; you can't buy it."

-Alan Taffel, a vice president at Internet-access provider Uunet Technologies.

MARCH 31-APRIL 2: The Embedded Systems Conference Spring
is at the New Navy Pier Festival Hall in Chicago this year,
and its Web site has details on all the
scheduled tutorials, "birds of a feather" meetings (BOFs),
classes and speakers.

BREWER SCIENCE INC. (Rolla, Mo.), a supplier of application-oriented products to the micro- and optoelectronics industries, has a site that offers info on the 17-year-old company's activities in chemical and equipment manufacturing for industrial and government contracts.

THE NATIONAL ACTION COUNCIL FOR MINORITIES IN ENGINEERING has upgraded its Web site with up-to-date information, news and an archive of past forums.

SILICON VALLEY GROUP INC. (San Jose, Calif.), a supplier of automated wafer-processing equipment for the semiconductor industry, has a site with info on its products. Those include photoresist processing equipment; oxidation, diffusion and low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) processing systems; and photolithography exposure tools that use step-a nd-scan technology .

THE ELECTRONICS DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY NETWORK has added "EDTN Direct" via the Pointcast Network, which is delivered to the desktop from the Web using "push" technology.

EMBEDDED.COM has grown into a powerhouse site since starting as a promotional vehicle for the Embedded Systems conferences a couple of years ago.

Business publisher Miller Freeman in San Francisco does a terrific job of satisfying the technical needs of embedded-systems design engineers, offering a mixed bag of related news, feature articles, and code and downloadable software.

The main site offers embedded headline ne ws, and the company also has its popular source guides available. For example, browse or search from the TI DSP Third-Party Development Support Guide or the Motorola Embedded Systems Source Guide.

There's the informative sites for the now-hot conferences (see this week's "Events"), but most intriguing is the volume of free content from the monthly print magazine Embedded Systems Programming (ESP). Articles on designing real-time systems and code generation from object models abound.

Also available is all the code that's been printed in ESP-from '89 to the present-with a virtual showcase of embedded-related demos and downloads thrown in.

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